D-League Basketball: Santa Cruz Warriors forward Joe Alexander is back on the rebound

SANTA CRUZ >> Everything Joe Alexander has gone through the last two years, from his injury to his ongoing recovery, he wears on his sleeve.

His right sleeve, to be exact.

Alexander, a forward for the Santa Cruz Warriors who in January played his first game in 24 months, has a fresh shoulder-to-elbow tattoo on his right arm. It's of a stylized caduceus — the staff carried by Hermes in Greek mythology, but also the medical profession's emblem with two intertwining serpents that lead up to a pair of wings.

The caduceus is an unusual tattoo for someone who's a dunker, not a doctor, but it holds a special meaning for Alexander. A first-round NBA Draft pick in 2008, Alexander discovered a stress fracture to his left tibia in late 2011. Since then, he has experienced a long road — seemingly endless, at times — to recovery. He had surgery some 14 months ago and has been strengthening and conditioning his left leg ever since. Setbacks have been frequent — sometimes every other day, even — and the restoration process is expected to continue through the foreseeable future.

But ever determined, Alexander is back on the court and playing basketball again thanks to an endless list of coaches and training staff for Golden State and Santa Cruz, as well as the physicians at Precision Wellness Center -- and even Alexander himself.

Everyone in the D-League is trying to get to the NBA. But Alexander had to first get back to the game of basketball.

"Man, I just love to play ball," said Alexander, the first Taiwanese-born NBA player who didn't begin playing competitive, 5-on-5 basketball until he was 16. "Before I had the surgery, I never would have said that. I would have been like, you know, I'm passionate about winning and I want to play in the NBA. But I've learned through this process, I just love to play basketball. And when I'm not playing, I'm sad. That's all it comes down to. I've learned that through this process "

The 6-foot-8 forward at times believed he might never play the game competitively again, but he has appeared in 13 games since his debut with the Warriors.

"It's crazy," Alexander, 27, said, "because when I was young, the prospect of taking one day off was really daunting to me. I was paranoid about it. And the thought of, like, a month off was even crazier. So two years is unthinkable.

"The fact that I actually played after that much time off is really nuts to me."

Alexander played 27 minutes during his first game back against Reno on Jan. 31, roughly seven minutes more than what the team had initially game planned. He felt good, he said, and he played even better. Alexander scored 12 points and pulled down 12 rebounds.

Afterward, he had difficulty putting into words what it was like to play basketball again.

"It's been like hell, basically," he said of his hiatus.

The caduceus tells the tale. Even though his rendition of the serpentined staff isn't anything like what you might see on a doctor's lapel, the tattoo — like any meaningful body art — has a story behind it.

Alexander is in the process of completing it.

"This is leading up to becoming a really good story for him," Santa Cruz coach Casey Hill said.

'LIKE CRAWLING IN THE DARK'

Alexander was in Russia, of all places, when he discovered in December 2011 the injury that would completely alter his career. It was during the NBA lockout, and Alexander was finding his basketball outlet with BC Krasnye Krylya in Samara, Russia — more than 5,400 miles away from where he attended college at West Virginia.

He had gone to great distances to keep playing the game, but Alexander's game was cut short — and his career put on hold — with an X-ray in the middle of the season.

"It was pretty devastating to me on two fronts," Alexander said. "One, that I would have to take a lot of time off, but, two, I didn't know how much (time) and no one else seemed to know, either. With this injury, it's kind of a wild card as far as when you'll be able to come back from it.

"So, it was like crawling in the dark. You never know how long it will take to heal. It's different for each guy. One guy could take three weeks, one guy could take 12 months. Nobody can tell you when it will be good."

Alexander opted to take what he called the "passive route" and bypass surgery, instead allowing his body to heal on its own.

Obviously that approach didn't pan out. After a year had passed and the fracture still hadn't properly healed, Alexander finally underwent the surgery that left him with three scars on his left leg — two for where the nails were put in, one for where doctors made an incision so they could slide a titanium rod down his bone.

The surgery was supposed to help fix everything, but the setbacks continued. Frustrated, he began researching other professional athletes who had stress-fracture surgery and came back to enjoy successful basketball careers.

The list was fairly short, he said.

"I found like, one guy. And I found NBA guys who had the surgery, but I never found anybody who had it, came back and had a successful career," Alexander said. "So that's when I got worried, you know?

"Maybe that's because people don't come back from this."

Alexander had to give it a try.

"I'm just doing anything I can to put myself in a position to be successful," he said. "I've only got one shot at this basketball thing I'm not going to let any individual thing slip by me, whether it's nutrition or working out or getting shots up."

'A LONG-TERM PLAY'

NBA teams don't usually operate like this. They don't usually invite players to training camp, discover an injury is worse than they initially expected and keep that player around to take up a roster spot.

But the Golden State Warriors saw something in Alexander that other teams didn't.

"Joe was always a long-term play," said Kirk Lacob, general manager of the Santa Cruz Warriors.

Also an assistant general manager with Golden State, Lacob said the organization was well aware of Alexander's injury but wasn't sure how serious it was. Even after collecting more information, the team invited him to camp this past offseason, knowing he probably wasn't going to play much — if at all.

Alexander, who said he hadn't played since his surgery when he got the invitation, spent the two weeks prior to the training camp at open gyms in an effort to get ready. He had every intention of showing up in Oakland and playing in an effort to make the team.

Instead, he was put into a walking boot after Golden State administered an MRI.

"By the time he showed up, we did a lot more sensitive testing and realized he wasn't ready to go for a while — if we wanted him to be healthy for the rest of his career and regain a lot of the athleticism he lost, because he used to be an absolute freak athlete," Lacob said. "So we brought him to camp and told him, 'Here's the deal: You're going to miss camp, you're going to miss a couple of months, but we're going to get you there. We promise that.'

"I think it's hard for a guy who's been through a lot, been through some tough situations in the NBA and some tough situations overseas, to trust people. But give him credit, he trusted us. And we worked with him from that point and he bought in more than I could imagine."

Alexander, forever grateful, wasn't immediately waived — a surprise since he's seen players get cut from training camp for something as minor as an ankle sprain. He continued through training camp with Golden State and was one of the team's final cuts. Then the team sent him to Santa Cruz as an affiliate player.

The Warriors took a gamble, but they knew what Alexander had been — an explosive forward with lots of talent and character who played three seasons in the NBA with the Milwaukee Bucks and Chicago Bulls -- and had faith in what he could be.

"We believe in guys like that, even if they've had issues in the past," Lacob said. "We thought Joe was a good bet to make."

'PEELING AN ONION'

Stress fractures don't happen overnight. They develop over time. So although Alexander learned of the injury after an X-ray in December 2011, it had been developing for months, perhaps years.

Mike Douglas, the Santa Cruz Warriors' head athletic trainer, wanted to trace the injury back to its beginning. While breaking down film of Alexander's games, he noticed inconsistencies in the player's jumping and landing patterns dating all the way back to his days in college. Douglas discovered that Alexander at one point in college tore an abdominal muscle, which led him to redistribute his weight and caused an asymmetry in his muscle performance.

"The body is a fail-safe system," Douglas said. "He healed from (the torn ab muscle), but the muscles are still working to find a different way to exude force."

Alexander was already working with Santa Cruz athletic performance coach Kyle Barbour on a daily basis. In December, he began rehabbing two to three times a week at Precision Wellness Center in Aptos and with Chris Christensen, doctor of physical therapy. The goal was to re-train Alexander's movement patterns through Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization, or DNS, which intends to align the body's muscles and, thus, remove the added stress on Alexander's left leg.

"Not one part of your body should be taking on all the weight," Christensen said. "It's from the top down: The hips handle more than the knees, the knees more than the ankles."

Christensen said Alexander wasn't moving his pelvis, hips and rib cage correctly, which changed how he landed on his legs and ultimately led to the stress fracture. The surgery didn't solve the problem because Alexander continued to jump and land incorrectly afterward.

"Chris uses the term, 'peeling an onion,'" Douglas said. "Until you get to the core, you don't know what the real problem is."

Years of muscle memory only added to the layers. To correct the problem, Christensen had to start at ground zero. He had to teach Alexander how to properly jump again.

And that started with the professional athlete lying on his back and breathing from his diaphragm.

Soon Alexander was breathing while lying on his side, then his stomach, then in a crawling position on all fours. Using small, measured movements, he went into a half-kneel, to squatting to standing up. Christensen said the goal was to teach Alexander, through each position, how "to create correct intra-abdominal control, trunk and pelvic posture, and properly load his left hip to reduce his chronic lower leg stress."

Christensen said Alexander couldn't even put his body weight on his left leg in December. It makes the 27 minutes he played on Jan. 31 seem like a total marvel.

Alexander still incorporates those movements into his pre-game exercises in an effort to retrain and re-emphasize proper moving patterns.

"By the end of the summer," Christensen said, "he'll be jumping a new way where he won't have to think about it."

'I CAN DO IT AGAIN'

Alexander said he can't really put into words the gratitude he has for the Warriors organization. He said he never felt pressured to get back on the court as quickly as possible, which could have hindered his recovery process.

"I could have spent the last six months at home, struggling to find good trainers and get good workouts," Alexander said. "But instead I got to be here with a first-class organization and feel a part of the team.

"The players, the coaches, they've been unbelievable. I really can't explain how crazy good this organization has been to me. Casey Hill has been understanding as far as letting me practice one day and taking a couple days off. I really needed that."

"Joe's like a different breed of human being," Hill said. "He's ridiculously healthy. He's ridiculously determined and motivated to get back to this level and to play. And it's showing.

"He's got a work ethic that's unmatched and he's got an attitude that's ferocious. And I couldn't be happier."

On March 7 and 8, Alexander played in his first back-to-back games and registered 26 and 28 minutes, respectively — just another sign toward his improvement and another chapter in the story.

But, like his tattoo of the caduceus, which Alexander plans to add colors and elements to in the near future, his story isn't completed just yet.

There's another chapter still yet to be penned, one that Alexander hopes leads to another shot in the NBA.

"I look back on it to try to learn things. But for the most part, that's a closed book for me," Alexander said of his previous NBA stint. "In my mind, my goal was to get to the NBA, and I did it and that's over. Now I have new goals — they're very similar, like get back to the NBA. But I'm focused on those now.

"I've done it once, I'm sure I can do it again."

Contact Andrew Matheson at (831) 706-3272.

Train Like Warriors

The Santa Cruz Warriors will host a special sports performance open house this Sunday (March 23) at Precision Wellness Center from 4-6 p.m. Fans will be able to learn about the Warriors' training regimen and try their hand at specific exercises on cutting-edge equipment.